Forest at Fontainbleau by Matisse

This week's art is from the National Gallery in London.  It is a bold and beautiful painting that has lots of texture as well as luxurious and bold color.
Once the domain and hunting ground of kings, the Forest of Fontainebleau, some thirty-five miles southeast of Paris, is where French landscape painting and photography took root. Rough and unspoiled, the forest was exalted as an example of nature in its purest state. Its distinctive terrain — verdant woods, magnificent old-growth trees, imposing rock formations, and stark plateaus — offered a wealth of motifs that attracted painters and photographers alike. The forest was such a point of national pride that a portion of it was set aside in 1861 as the first nature preserve in history.

A decade after the introduction of photography in 1839, photographers such as Gustave Le Gray arrived in the forest, similarly seeking to capture the ephemeral moods of nature. Often working side by side, photographers and painters inspired each other to explore new ways of representing landscape. This exhibition brings together paintings, pastels, and photographs, as well as artists’ equipment and tourist ephemera, to celebrate the dynamic relationship between artists and locale at a crucial point in history when a new modern art was forged in the Forest of Fontainebleau.